Overhaul of snooping laws demanded

A human rights group said poor drafting of surveillance laws has allowed CCTV to spread

Plans to curb council snooping do not go far enough and the UK's surveillance laws should be overhauled to stop "unnecessary, unwarranted and unchecked state intrusion", campaigners said.

More than 20,000 warrants for the interception of phone calls, emails and internet use have been issued since the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) came into force in 2000, the human rights group Justice said.

It called for a root-and-branch reform of Britain's surveillance powers to provide "genuinely effective safeguards against abuse".

Justice said so-called directed surveillance, where someone can be followed or have their house watched, had been authorised on at least 30,000 occasions in the past decade.

A further 2.7 million requests have been made for information such as phone bills or location data, along with more than 4,000 authorisations for intrusive surveillance, where bugs are planted, the group said.

In all, nearly three million surveillance decisions have been taken by public bodies under Ripa since 2000, but fewer than 5,000 were approved by a judge, the report found. And it said the main complaints body, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, has only upheld 10 of 1,100 complaints since Ripa began.

Justice said the proposals to curb the excessive use of surveillance powers in the Protection of Freedoms Bill do not go far enough. "Ripa has not only failed to check a great deal of plainly excessive surveillance by public bodies over the last decade but, in many cases, inadvertently encouraged it," the report said.

"Its poor drafting has allowed councils to snoop, phone hacking to flourish, privileged conversations to be illegally recorded, and CCTV to spread. It is also badly out of date."

A Home Office spokesman said: "The first duty of the state is the protection of its citizens, but this should never be an excuse for the Government to intrude into people's private lives. This is why we are changing the law to restore common sense and prevent local authorities using surveillance for trivial offences.

"The Protection of Freedoms Bill will ensure local authorities cannot use Ripa without approval of a magistrate. This is an important further safeguard to ensure that information is not misused."